Google launches new AI PaLM 2 in attempt to regain leadership of the pack

theguardian.com:

Google is attempting to reclaim its crown as the leader in artificial intelligence with PaLM 2, a “next-generation language model” that the company says outperforms other leading systems on some tasks.

Revealing the cutting-edge AI at its annual I/O conference, alongside a foldable Pixel phone and a new tablet, Google said it would be built in to 25 new products and features, as the company races to catch up with competitors after years of producing AI research but few products.

Like other “large language models” such as OpenAI’s GPT, PaLM 2 is a general-purpose AI model, which can be used to power ChatGPT-style chatbots but also translate between languages, write computer code, or even analyse and respond to images. Combining those capabilities, a user could ask a question in English about a restaurant in Bulgaria, and the system would be able to search the web for Bulgarian responses, find an answer, translate the answer into English, add a picture of the location – and then follow up with a code snippet to create a database entry for the place.

“The neural network revolution that we are now experiencing started around 10 years ago,” said Slav Petrov, the co-lead of the PaLM 2 project, “and it started in part at Google.” AI breakthroughs including the “transformer”, the T in GPT [Generative Pre-Trained Transformer], came from the company’s research, Petrov said.

“We’re really excited to make these models available broadly externally, because we want to see what people can do with them,” he added. “We believe that they will open up a lot of opportunities to do things that were previously thought magic and really out of reach, but that now can be accomplished thanks to the amazing progress in machine learning that we’ve seen